Manning Sentenced

From the BBC:
"Bradley Manning sentenced to 35 years in Wikileaks case"

The US soldier convicted of handing a trove of secret government documents to anti-secrecy website Wikileaks has been sentenced to 35 years in prison. Pte First Class Bradley Manning, 25, was convicted in July of 20 charges against him, including espionage. In a statement read by his lawyer after the sentencing, Pte Manning said he had acted "out of love for our country". Pte Manning will receive a credit against his sentence of about three and a half years, including time he has already served in jail and 112 days in recompense for the harsh conditions of his initial confinement. His defence lawyer David Coombs said Pte Manning would first be eligible for parole in about seven years.  Prosecutors had asked for a 60-year sentence in order to send a message to future potential leakers, and Wikileaks called the 35-year sentence a "significant strategic victory". Military prosecutors did not immediately comment.  In addition to the prison sentence, likely to be served at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, Judge Col Denise Lind sentenced Pte Manning to be demoted to private and dishonourably discharged from the US Army, and to forfeit his pay. While stationed in Iraq in 2010, the junior intelligence analyst passed hundreds of thousands of battlefield reports and diplomatic cables to Wikileaks, the pro-transparency group headed by Julian Assange. Pte Manning has said he leaked the secret files in the hopes of sparking a public debate about US foreign policy and the military.

^ Manning is lucky that he only got 35 years and not the death penalty. What he did is treason plain and simple. If he felt so strongly about reforming the US military and its foreign policy he could have released the documents to an American group - while that is still treason at least it won't have aided another country. The only bad thing here is that if her gets out in 7 years he can flee to the UK as he is a dual citizen - although I always thought you couldn't have access to secret documents/information if you either had dual citizenship or weren't an American at all. I guess someone on the US side messed that up and now we are all paying for it. Manning and Snowden should have their last names changed to "Quisling." If you don't know that reference then you should look it up on Wikipedia. ^

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-23784288